Learning Resource Exchange

European Schoolnet actively supports the Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practice movement in Europe. In collaboration with our network of schools and teachers, we also contribute to the development, testing and validation of new resources. These objectives of supporting Open Education have been put into practice by the members of the LRE-subcommittee, currently made up of seven Ministries of Education.

The LRE-subcommittee of European Schoolnet has steered the development of EUNs LRE Infrastructure. The LRE infrastructure is composed of several directories, services and platforms to help teachers, students and Ministries of Education discover, use, share and create Open Educational Resources.

The members of the LRE-subcommittee, in collaboration with the Educational Repositories Network, also sponsor seminars and webinars to facilitate the exchange of expertise and best practices in the field of e-learning and Open Educational Practices.

The LRE Infrastructure components are:

LRE Directories and Tools

The LRE Directory of Open Educational Resources (OERs) is a catalog describing OERs from a variety of collections and in a variety of languages. Currently the catalog describes more than 300,000 OERs. New collections are regularly added to the catalog by EUN or at the request of LRE Subcommittee members.

The LRE Directory of Open Educational Repositories is a database that can be accessed in a web interface describing the collections themselves with information about their objectives, subjects, languages, etc. and how their information is shared with the LRE.

The LRE APIs and exchange protocols are tools and software used by LRE content consumers, such as MoEs, to pull information from the LRE in order to display it in their own teacher portals. In turn, LRE's tools can also pull information from other content providers and from other EUN databases.

The Vocabulary Bank for Education (VBE) is a database of vocabularies. These vocabularies have been translated into many languages and are used across EUN databases, the Directory of OERs and even outside EUN where you can find the same terms used by several MoEs to describe their own learning resources. Using the same vocabularies to describe activities and resources of EUN makes it possible to keep information organized and to easily find similar items or topics across projects and collections. While the VBE is used by EUN's software, there is a human readable interface used to manage the database: http://europeanschoolnet-vbe.lexaurus.net/vbe/browse

LRE for School Portal is a platform that displays and makes findable all the records in the Directory of Open Educational Resources. It is a demonstration portal that is not used directly by teachers. Rather it is used to showcase resources created or collected during EC projects and helps the administrators of the LRE Infrastructure to manage the collections. The portal is available here: http://lreforschools.eun.org/

The LRE infrastructure has been developed over a number of years mainly using funding from EC projects such as MELT, ASPECT, Europeana DSI 1 and 2, eQNet, SENnet, LangOER. Currently, we maintain and run the LRE Infrastructure using funding from Ministries of Education in the LRE Subcommittee.

Membership in the LRE-subcommittee is open to all organizations interested in taking advantage of the LRE network, the LRE infrastructure, and the expertise it has developed around the discovery and exchange of Open Educational Resources for K-12 education. This includes Ministries of Education, regional authorities, and other profit and non-profit educational organizations.